Reading recent diary entries about the "state of the
community", I'm reminded of just how much the free software
world has changed in the past ten years.

Free software used to be very neighborly-- hacks written
by motivated individuals. Now it's political, with most
packages molded by committee. As a result, free software
has lost the human face it once had. Not long ago, you'd
hunt down individual packages that included README files
along the lines of:

Hi, thanks for using [package]! If you enjoy
[package], drop me a line! I don't want money for my work,
but if you want to give me something, [I/my husband/my
wife/my child] collect [coins/postcards/matchbooks] from
around the world! My address is [locality].
Enjoy!

Nowadays, the sum of my interaction with the author of a
software package is likely to consist of

$ apt-get install foo

dpkg says that I have slightly over six
hundred seperate free software packages installed on my
laptop. I can name the authors of maybe ten of them. Since
everything is precompiled and GPL'd (or equivalent), I have
no reason to even look at the READMEs. It's all very
impersonal.

It's difficult to get involved now-- or at least, to
feel like you're getting involved. You put up
projects or patches and you get downloads, but no responses.
It's difficult to gauge whether your work is appreciated,
or even welcome. So while free software is more popular and
widely used than ever, there's far less human encouragement.
(Watching a download counter turn over does not qualify as
"human encouragement".)

Ha ha! Bring back the gonzo licenses! Up with
postcardware! The shareware people had it right all along!